'Mannahatta,' by Eric W. Sanderson

Nonfiction

Mannahatta as seen from above Brooklyn, looking to the north. The island was once home to forests, ponds, streams and salt marshes.

Mannahatta as seen from above Brooklyn, looking to the north. The island was once home to forests, ponds, streams and salt marshes.

Photo: Copyright Markley Boyer, Courtesy Of The American ...

Photo: Copyright Markley Boyer, Courtesy Of The American ...

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Mannahatta as seen from above Brooklyn, looking to the north. The island was once home to forests, ponds, streams and salt marshes.

Mannahatta as seen from above Brooklyn, looking to the north. The island was once home to forests, ponds, streams and salt marshes.

Photo: Copyright Markley Boyer, Courtesy Of The American ...

'Mannahatta,' by Eric W. Sanderson

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Mannahatta

A Natural History of New York City

By Eric W. Sanderson

(Abrams; 352 pages; $40)

Most visitors to Times Square see crowds, flashing lights, taxicabs and skyscrapers. Not Eric Sanderson. When he is surrounded by the din of New York City, he closes his eyes and sees 400 years into the past. Back then, Manhattan - or Mannahatta, as it was called by the American Indians who lived there - was covered in shady green forests and crisscrossed with streams. In Times Square, there was even a beaver pond.

How does Sanderson know what Times Square looked like hundreds of years ago - before modern mapping techniques or even photography were invented? Envisioning the ghostly contours of Manhattan's wild past wasn't easy. Sanderson spent 10 years researching the city's environmental history and plugging every hard-won nugget of information he found into computer models. The result is "Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City" - an exuberantly written and beautifully illustrated exploration of pre-European Gotham.

Filled with re-creations of lost ecosystems now covered with concrete and steel, "Mannahatta" describes a wilderness that Sanderson believes would rival Yosemite in environmental splendor. On the book's cover, a satellite photo of Manhattan's towering presence in 2009 is juxtaposed against a computer-generated image of Mannahatta of old, an untouched sinuous green landscape veined and dotted with blue freshwater. This before-and-after shot is enough to blow a city dweller's mind. But inside the book, Sanderson conjures these long-buried green spaces in ever more fascinating detail.

A landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society (the organization that runs the Bronx Zoo as well as hundreds of conservation projects worldwide), Sanderson began his research with this question: What did the explorer Henry Hudson see in 1609 when he sailed up the river that now bears his name? One key to answering that question turned out to be the rediscovery of an 18th century map drawn during the British occupation of Manhattan during the Revolutionary War.

The map's scale and detail were so good that Sanderson was able to sync it with 21st century maps and learn how Manhattan's landscape had been altered. Sanderson's description of the process of putting together these maps reads a bit like a detective story - and it's fascinating following the process as he discovers more and more about the city's ecological past.

With the additional help of archaeological clues, Sanderson reveals the lives of the Lenni Lenape, the American Indians who originally occupied Mannahatta. The Lenape ate fresh fish and dinner-plate-sized oysters pulled from the Hudson River. They burned parcels of forest to create farmland for growing beans, corn and squash. They also repeatedly burned the area of what is now Harlem to create a vast grassland where they hunted wild game.

As an obsessive chronicler of natural history, Sanderson also turns to letters and diaries written in the 1600s by early Dutch settlers, and he uses them to flesh out Mannahatta's flora and fauna. Some of these accounts make the island sound like an ecological Eden with "multitudes of wolves, wild cats ... flying squirrels - beavers in great numbers, minks, otters, bears." One writer complained that birds "fill the woods so that men can scarcely go through them for the whistling, the noise, and the chattering."

But many wild species were not destined to hang around long after the first Europeans arrived. Wolves were driven out of Upper Manhattan in the 1720s. American chestnut trees, passenger pigeons, black bears and river otters were evicted as well. Peaks and crags - which gave Mannahatta its name (it means "island of many hills") - were not immune to the destructive forces of the new settlers. One phantom hill - called Verlettenberg by the Dutch - existed close to where the statue of a bronze bull now stands near Wall Street.

Verlettenberg was high enough to warrant an anti-reckless-sledding ordinance in the 1670s, but the hill vanished on later maps after being flattened to make way for new construction. Ponds, streams and brooks likewise disappeared. Collect Pond, a 48-acre body of water that served as the primary source of drinking water for early settlers, was eventually filled in (after being poisoned by surrounding leather tanneries), and a notorious jail known as "the Tombs" was built on the site.

Sanderson excels at unearthing compelling stories about New York City's natural and unnatural history. He also successfully explains complex relationships in natural systems, creating a tool he calls Muir webs to show how species, soil types, habitat elements, topography and other resources interconnect. In the book's final chapter, he links the island's environmental past to current urban issues - ranging from water pollution to the carbon footprint.

Sanderson's stated goal in reimagining New York's past is not to return the city to its "primeval state." Instead, he wants us to alter our perceptions of the current metropolis by introducing us to the green heart of Mannahatta. In doing this, he creates an intriguing context for contemplating a greener future for all cities.